The Minnesota Twins and Derek Falvey, the president of baseball operations and business operations for the team, have “mutually agreed to part ways,” the team has announced this morning. General manager Jeremy Zoll will take over the baseball operations role for now, with the team saying they will immediately begin searching for a replacement for Falvey. Tom Pohlad will “temporarily” handle the business operations, presumably until a permanent
This is something of a bombshell, given the circumstances and the timing. Falvey, 42, was hired as the chief baseball office for the Twins in October of 2016, having spent the previous eight years in Cleveland’s front office. He hired then-Rangers assistant general manager Thad Levine to be the team’s general manager, a position Levine held until the end of the 2024 season.
Advertisement
Falvey’s first year with the club, the Twins went from winning 59 games in 2016 to 85 games in 2017, earning a Wild Card berth. After a losing 2018 season, the Twins won 101 games in 2019 and went 36-24 in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, although they were swept in the first round both years. The Twins won the A.L. Central with 87 wins in 2023, and sweeping the Jays in the Wild Card round before losing to the Astros in the ALDS, thus missing out on the opportunity to get knocked out by the Rangers in the ALCS.
After going 82-80 in 2024, the Twins got off to a poor start in 2025, and ultimately traded off almost half of their team at the deadline, with the team going into full rebuild mode, ultimately finishing at 70-92. They also fired manager Rocco Baldelli, who had been the team’s manager since 2019, at season’s end.
The Twins have been fairly successful during Falvey’s run atop the organization, especially given the fact that the Twins have pretty consistently maintained one of the lower payrolls in MLB. That said, it wouldn’t have been shocking if he and the team had parted ways at the end of the 2025 season.
The fact that this is happening just a couple of weeks before pitchers and catchers report to spring training, however, is extremely unusual. The top baseball guy doesn’t generally leave at this point in the offseason, unless it is in the aftermath of a suspension for running a crooked operation.
Advertisement
The quotes from Pohlad and Falvey in the announcement linked above suggest that there wasn’t necessarily an alignment between what the Twins were going to want to do going forward and how Falvey wanted to run things.
